Record Won`t Change Grambling `Legend`

That he took Turner`s advice will almost surely allow the 1985 team to feel the special touch of history. They should be able to share the joy of breaking Bryant`s record.

``Being part of No. 324 will follow me forever,`` says senior defensive end Leonard Griffin. ``I always wanted to play for Grambling, and having a milestone like this to look back on . . . . It`s something to live for.``

``It means a great deal to me and all the quarterbacks before me,``

Landry says. ``All the great quarterbacks who have set records here have told me they would trade in all their stats and records to walk in my shoes.``

To walk in Bryant`s company was enough for Robinson. The first thing one sees upon entering Grambling`s football conference room is an autographed drawing of the Bear. That is a small measure of the esteem in which Robinson holds the late Alabama coach, who retired only a month before he died. At the Bear`s funeral, Robinson intimated he might retire short of the record.

The Grambling coach still has palpably mixed feelings about breaking it. What Robinson most regrets is that he never got a chance to play Bryant. Their agreement to meet was always thwarted by scheduling conflicts.

``When people asked if I wasn`t afraid the Bear would beat me, I told them: `He`s beaten everyone else. At least you could tell the Great Scorer you played the best,` `` Robinson says.

The coaches` mutual admiration began when Bryant, then the outgoing American Football Coaches Association president, asked Robinson to defuse a potentially explosive situation on the floor of their annual convention. When Robinson brought back a solution after another man had failed, a grateful Bryant said, ``That`s what I want when I send a man to do something

--results.``

The ultimate result was an enduring friendship between this presumably odd couple--the white coach whose teams had no blacks until they started losing to integrated opponents, and the black coach who would later lose some of his best prospects to schools that once thought of segregation as a divine law. What they had both endured growing up dirt-poor in the South proved to be a link that no amount of statutes could break.

At the banquet before the 1983 Liberty Bowl between Illinois and Alabama, which was Bryant`s last game, the Bear insisted on a program change that allowed him to present Robinson with the American Service Award. Robinson similarly disregarded the instructions for a nonpartisan acceptance speech to praise Bryant.

``I had to tell what he had meant to our profession,`` Robinson says,

``how he had made all of us proud to be football coaches, how his rise from Moro Bottom, Arkansas, to the pinnacle of football success would always be an inspiration to young Americans.``

Change Moro Bottom to east Baton Rouge and the same words apply to Robinson, whose belief that one can rise from rags to riches has never wavered. Others have criticized Robinson for not being more militant and outspoken on civil rights issues, but he was too busy trying to make the system work to worry about overthrowing it. He had felt far too much injustice to be blind to it, yet he remained secure in his belief that blind justice would prevail.

``He spent his time getting youngsters ready and let others go out there and march,`` Doris Robinson says.

To a player who didn`t want to stand for the national anthem, Robinson gave the choice of remaining in the locker room. The player wound up singing louder than anyone else.

``All the things that have happened to blacks, and the man will never say anything bad about America,`` Johnson says.

Robinson has expressed his dismay over the lack of black head coaches and the treatment of black quarterbacks in the pros. (``If Bear turned out all those, I should be able to turn out one,`` Robinson has said.) Of all his quarterbacks, only Williams and James Harris have been NFL players at the position, and their careers went sour for reasons some feel had nothing to do with talent.

Yet, when players or friends or family are asked how Robinson would like to be remembered, the answer invariably begins, ``as an American.`` The coach is convinced, with some justification, that if Bryant were alive, he would be the first to congratulate Robinson on breaking the record.

``That`s the way it is in America,`` Robinson says.

The way it was in America means that such congratulations have been long overdue for Eddie Robinson. The widespread fuss over the landmark victory will finally let all of America know a native son whose accomplishments are numberless.

``People forget records, but if you incorporate your spirit and your principles into the lives of young people, they will never let your spirit and your name die,`` Turner says. ``You will become immortal.``

Eddie Robinson has. And he will be. And, best of all, he is. That is what becomes a legend most.